 Hello, everybody, I'm Nicholasby with Reason. I am joined by Zach Weismiller, my colleague at Reason. And today we are talking about the Tyree Nichols beating death, killing at the hands of the Memphis police and we're joined by Walter Katz. Walter Katz is a, he's at Arnold Ventures, which is a nonprofit or an advocacy group that does a lot of work particularly on things like criminal justice. He was a 17 year public defender in Southern California, has worked with the Chicago administration of Rahm Emanuel to help clean up their police department and public safety and a bunch of other things like that. He's an incredible voice on police reform. Walter, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Nick. I really appreciate it. You too, Zach. Yep, thanks, Walter. So let's start with talking about what we're gonna do is go through the Tyree Nichols beating or incident. We've got video, I wanna warn everybody and I'll try to remember to do this throughout. We're gonna be showing not just the Nichols case but other cases that are pretty rough going. So people should be forewarned about that. But we're gonna talk about this particular instance and then talk about what it says about policing in general, what it says about policing since George Floyd and going back to Rodney King or even before that and then larger questions about the reality and possibility for police reform, progress, race in America and things like that. But Zach, why don't we start first by beginning, let's show a clip of the incident in Memphis that has launched this latest forced conversation about police violence. Yeah, so this first clip will be the when Tyree Nichols was first pulled over at a intersection, there's gonna be a couple clips here. So first we're gonna see him being pulled over. We can discuss what happened there and then we'll move on to the actual beating that occurred as he ran to cul-de-sac. So here is the, here's Tyree being pulled over. Motherfuckers, motherfuckers, motherfuckers! You get your ass blown with the fuck out! Get the fuck out of here! Get the fuck out the fucking cuck! Damn, I didn't do anything! Hey, what the fuck is that? Hey, I didn't turn your ass around! All right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right! All right, you don't do that, okay? Get on the fucking cuck! Okay, I'm gonna change your ass! All right, all right, all right, I'm on the ground. All right, all right, all right, all right, all right! Please change the fucking shit! Okay, dude, dang! You're trying to fuck around. Put your hands on the fuck out! Bitch, put your hands on the back, quick! Okay, stop! Knock the ass the fuck out! Okay, you guys are really doing a lot right now. Bro, what is that? Where is it? Okay, get the fuck out of here! Okay. Man, there is so much to discuss about that and I guess as a first question, Walter, some people argue that representing or showing clips like this are themselves a form of violence or damaging to kind of public discourse. How do you feel about that? Well, things can be traumatic and do some degree of harm, but unbalanced serve a really important role of shining light on our government, right? This is state action, right? And we are interested in understanding what are the limits as well as what is the state capable of. We have to be able to see things like that. We have to be able to see things like what happens to most vulnerable people in our population. And historical factors is that black people are amongst the most vulnerable people in American society. Another thing I would add is that I understand what people are saying. I mean, I've been looking at video footage and security camera footage and now later body-worn camera footage of police use of force and police brutality going back now two decades. And I know the toll that it takes and these things are hard to watch. Yeah, it is important. I mean, I think a lot, this is too neat a kind of division, but I think a lot about before and after Rodney King and the transformative nature of the video of police doing the things that you kind of heard about but had no way of understanding. So the visual impact of this stuff as rough as it is is really important. Talk from the point of view of somebody who has prosecuted police and also worked with police departments and other forms of law enforcement in order to kind of make things better. What is going on in that scene that is most important for people to understand? Yeah, so my background, first began as a public defender for many years and defended people who are being charged with either resisting arrest or assault on the police officer. And this is before the era of body-worn cameras and a lot of security cameras. So it was often the word of the officer against the word of my client. And very often the system ended up believing the officer. The advent of video footage has changed the equation. And then it spent many years either as a police auditor or an inspector general reviewing incidents just like this. And I would say that what you see exhibited there in the first two minutes is extraordinarily stupid policing. Lack of discipline, a lack of exhibiting any effort of de-escalation or what often police officers will say is taking control of the scene. So what you're seeing is immediately the officer start escalating, guns are drawn, yelling contradictory commands, not explaining what they're doing there. If you see a well-trained unit which is doing what they would consider a high-risk stop and let's assume for a second the officer is thought for some reason this is a high-risk stop even though they claim is this for reckless driving. So I have to assume this is what they do all the time. Their tactics are off the charge, horrible. And ineffective, right? I mean, the fact is that he gets away. There's like, they're swarming him and he manages to run away. Completely ineffective, right? If you're doing a traffic stop with a certain objective in mind which is removing the person from the car because of some sort of additional risk. It's what LAPD would call a felony stop. There's very particular practices in how you do those effectively while still maintaining control of the person you're seeking to detain. And how they did it here from young commands to escalating commands to giving contradictory commands to yanking them out of the car like that. And then not even have the tactical skill to keep him from running away. It's like before we get to the horribly sadistic policing later on, right now we're seeing is horribly stupid policing. Yeah. Zach, do you wanna go to the next clip? Let's go right into that next clip. So this will, you saw in that clip, he ran away. And again, it's understandable to me why he would run in that situation. I have had the misfortune of being ordered out of a car and handcuffed for kind of this case of mistaken identity. And the cops were relatively civil in that case. It was still, it was, it's terrifying just to be brought out of your car and handcuffed. I can't imagine being slammed to the ground and yelled all these orders and you're trying to comply. And then there's mace and tasers flying. So I think that people are, I've seen a line of commentary out there that, well, don't run from the police and this won't happen. But that's a, I mean, it's so hard to put yourself in that situation. And we can also talk about the context later of the reputation of this particular unit and how that could have played a role psychologically. But in any case, some other officers met up with him as he fled to a nearby neighborhood that apparently was near where his mother's house may have been. But I've spliced together a few different angles here. One is from a lamp post. So it's a high angle shot. And then you see some of the same off the officer's bodycams. And I may interject a couple of times just to narrate to help people follow what's going on here. So here's the high angle shot. You can see them on the ground. They're, again, trying to subdue him. You see an officer there with a gun on him. They've caught up to him after he ran. Yes, they caught up with him. An officer has a baton out. And now he's beating him with a baton as we never told him. Yeah, go ahead, Walter. So you've seen those baton strikes. They seem to be pretty unfocused. Again, poor tactics, lack of control. So sadly, Mr. Nichols ran into smack dab as compliance culture. He wasn't complying. So they take that as an affront, as from what I can say. And they kept on upping the ante. Yeah, well, and we'll see that same scene there from a different angle now and with some sound. Check the focal! Here's where he's from! Hey! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Hey! Watch out! Watch out! OK, all right, all right. Give me a hand! Give me a hand! All right. OK. Basically, now he's complying. What? You're saying he's complying? Essentially, at this point, when he says, oh, right, his hands are going behind his back now, he is complying. So I think that a lot of officers, you know, let's assume everything that just happened before with the really poor tactics and unnecessary escalation and inflammatory language that none of that has happened. And if somebody who is ostensibly has presented some resistance, he's saying all right now and they have control of his hands. Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Watch out! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Watch out! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Watch out! Spread your eyes again! All right! Give me a hand! All right! All right! Give me a hand, bro! Oh, shit! All right! Give me a hand! Oh, shit! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Give me a hand! Watch out! I'm about to pop the fuck out of you! Here the fuck it is! Here! Watch out! Watch out for a second now! Say that again. So I think this is really important with the body-worn camera footage of the show. Often you're saying, why do officers use force? And they use force because they have a reasonable belief in a threat to themselves or a threat to others. Or they're trying to seek compliance. Depending what the threat is that's presented, depends about how much force should be used. Now, this officer whose body-worn camera we just showed obviously did not think it was that urgent because he had completely stepped back to the Huda vehicle. He was taking a break and then what he was thinking. And then he decides to re-engage. Does he re-engage because there's some sort of ongoing threat that he now has to control? Or is he re-engaging because he now he wants to go in and get some licks? So again, you're showing a complete breakdown in what policing should be. Give us your hand! Give us your hand! Same location? Ross, it counts. Ross, it counts. Watch it. Give me your fucking hand. Give me your fucking hand. Give me your fucking hand. Give me your hand. Give me your hand. I mean, you can hear him slurring. Ross, it counts. Semiconscious. The question I have out of that clip is, you know, to most people, including myself, that looks like a beating of a, at some point, helpless and a relatively defenseless guy to the point of unconsciousness. And as you mentioned, they keep yelling, do this with your hands. Let me see your hands, even though it seems like they had him somewhat under control. These guys know that they're wearing body cameras. Why would they do this, knowing that it's all on camera? Well, and then subsequently, they filed a false police report with a narrative. I'm going to speculate here for a second. Okay. And the speculation is that when you have officers who engage in excessive force and violations of the Fourth Amendment on a regular basis, they are essentially rung the dice every single time that it is not going to go too far to get too much attention. So I don't know, for example, how did internal controls work within the Memphis Police Department. But many agencies, when there is a use of force, there's an escalating level of investigation. If an officer uses what they call personal weapons, which is hands and fists, perhaps pepper spray, that's generally going to be a low level of investigation, which in many agencies, perhaps their sergeant is going to look at that report and sign off on it, or she's not going to go that far past just reading their own narrative. It is when the injuries become more serious. Some agencies, for example, will require internal affairs to respond to any use of a taser or any use of head strikes with a baton to the head. But generally, it's remarkable how much force an officer can use, which doesn't kill somebody, and which doesn't cause serious injuries to trigger an internal affairs arrest. And these types of officers, except for the really dumb ones, I'm not sure which category these guys fall into, those types of sadistic officers, they know where the boundaries are, and they know that they can inflict a lot of pain if they want to without triggering it into an escalating investigation. Here, they miscalculated. Go ahead, Nick. I was going to say, I've read accounts that the officers that were involved in this particular incident have between three and six years' experience. So, you know, they're not green, right? They're not rookies. This isn't their first month or even first year on the job. But is that considered, are they seasoned officers or are they for this type of work? Because they're also, and I guess we can talk a little bit about that, the fact that they were part of a special unit within the police scorpion, which is a ridiculous acronym for, you know, you know, basically cops being allowed to kind of have more free reign on stuff. But like, is there, is it the length of their service here an issue or is it mostly the lack of training and restraining? A range of issues are a hand here. You identified two of them. Experience, lack of training, supervision, what systems have been put in place for accountability. All these all fit together, create a culture within an agency which will signal to officers of how much that they can get away with. And also the lack of, whether or not there's professionalism in terms of how tactics are used, what they would call defensive tactics in training. Either, there's two possibilities here, either these officers are not well trained on defensive tactics or they didn't use any of those lessons that they learned, and there was a lack of supervision to make sure that they were using tactics that they were trained on. To that experience question, when I was the independent police auto during the city of San Jose and this was during the year of 2016, when we looked, for example, at use of force data and complaint data, particularly from 2015, and mapped that against the experience level of officers, we did see clusters of use of force complaints really clustered amongst the least experienced officers, like one to five years of experience. And that's one of the challenges of how you can create systems which make excessive force more likely. For example, often, even though Memphis, for example, as I recall, the state of Tennessee does not allow officers to collectively bargain, but many agencies who are under collective bargaining, their union contracts give preferences by seniority for shift and location. So often you have the least experienced officers who are working together, often in the quote-unquote least desirable precincts in the districts and during a busy, what they call the busiest times, nighttime. And if you also have sergeant's contracts, which have the same system, you have them supervised by the least experienced sergeants. So there's a way that these systems are feeding into each other to allow for the conditions that can happen like here. Can I ask before Zach jumps in again, you kind of suggested or it seemed implicit in your conversation that cops know what they can get away with and they're gonna go right up to that line. In your experience and you've worked with police all over the country, is there a sense that they are in a war or that they are occupied? This is something I'm thinking back to the Dennis Hopper movie with Sean Penn and Robert Duvall colors. The idea that the LAPD, it often gets brooded about that they see themselves as an occupying army in a city that they're holding down. Is that your sense of things or is it that most cops don't see themselves as that way? They see themselves more as actual peacekeepers or custodians of social stability? I think even the latter can bind to trouble. But I think that in my experience of having looked at hundreds of use of force incidents and those which are excessive force or border and excessive force, there is a straight up of officers who are consciously going up to the limit and sometimes beyond. And this is a kind of a not all officers kind of statement. Most officers do think are doing their jobs and are actually doing their jobs well, except insofar as it comes to controlling what their fellow officers are doing. So sometimes you'll find units, especially these kind of specialized units which are a little walled off from everyone else, where they can get away with things because nobody else is watching them. And that's why I think the state of the art and policies are duties to intervene and a duty to report when you see misconduct and also a duty to render aid to somebody who's been injured. So this... Yeah, the wall of silence is a big issue here. Yeah, and it plays out in an interesting way and I've seen this happen in numerous use of force reports over the years, where the questionable conduct is often not seen by their colleagues. They'll be interviewed by internal affairs and, you know, do you see officers such and such... Wouldn't you see officers such and such do? And that officer is accused of unnecessarily punching the guy in the head. And the witness officer will say, I don't know. I was focused on his feet. I didn't know what was happening up above. And for me, there was always a headscratcher since this is a profession which they're trained and expected to be observant of what's going on around them to have situational awareness. But too often, that situational awareness breaks down when it comes to noticing what their colleagues are doing. Speaking of the wall of silence, this last clip I wanted to play from the incident is the aftermath. So it's when Tyree Nichols is, you know, they kind of push them up against the car. He's just slouching over there and they're all talking through what they think just happened or what maybe they want to say just happened. A lot of it, to me, did not sound like what I saw happen on the tape, but I would like to get your reaction to the way that the officers are talking about the incident right after it happens as they're waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Okay, right on time. We're about to get to the ground. Fuck my leg, bro. I know. When I see that boy running, bro, I ain't got no more. Bro. Come on, fuck over here. Come on, fuck over here. Come on, fuck over here. Come on. I'll just note right there that there was one of the officers there saying remember your camera's on as they're talking about this. Hey, sit up, bro. Sit up, man. Hey, uh, here you go. Bro. I hit them on so many pieces of tape. Fuck. I hit it, bro. Bro. Hold on, hold on. Hold on, hold on. I'm taking his camera off. Man, I was hitting him. I was hitting him with haymakers. What's going on, bro? You ain't even rockin', bro. You ain't even rockin', dude. What the fuck? I hit him, bro. He was going for the, not dope, he was going for the thong. He was going for the thong, too, so I'm late. He grabbed Mark Gunn and everybody was like, look, we got him out of the car. He was like, hey, bro, he's good. I'm going to swam. I'm going to hit me. He reached for Mark Gunn. He really had his hand on Mark Gunn. I'm like, that motherfucker's on there. So we tried to, I'm talking about, so we tried to get him stopped. He didn't stop. He didn't stop. Then he drove around. He was going to hit Mark Gunn. So then I'm like, god damn, man, what are we doing? He pulled up to the red light, stopped at the red light, put his turn signal on. So we jumped out of the car. She went from there. First of all, is that appropriate for them to be talking about this in that way amongst themselves? I would think that would compromise if you're an independent investigator the ability to kind of get a story out of everyone once you're there. It really seems they're kind of workshopping a narrative to tell about what just happened. Yeah. So I think the two clips are important for how they showed really two different phenomenon going on. That immediate aftermath when probably the cameras should not have been on from their perspective. And you heard incredibly unprofessional language and attitudes being exhibited. These guys were just in the fight. I mean, these are all big guys too, right? And Mr. Nichols was not a big guy. So it just goes again to show how incompetent their tactics were, that if they actually were trying to deal with a combative person who he was not, that how tactics were, but everything they were talking about you know, he makers in this and that show this, you know, just admissions of violence. The second clip though is that is was for the camera, right? And you heard basically one officer kind of walking through the narrative where everyone else could hear it. And so my guess would be if there was a subsequent administrative interview, you would hear pretty much everyone reflecting that. Now, I've not looked at, for example, the narrative in the police report that was filed that night, but my suspicion is that if you listen to what you just heard that one officer explained there, you're going to see a pretty close narrative that was written down in terms of how often that happens. That happens all the time, all the time where officers are discussing what occurred. It is treated as something benign, which it could be, right? But it also serves a purpose for creating this common understanding so everyone's coming off the same songbook, so it's not really benign. Now, after an officer while shooting, where there's going to be a more significant investigation, usually the first commander on the scene or the first supervisor on the scene, their obligation is to separate everybody before the conversation takes place in a good agency. They're driven in separately back to their station, driven by somebody else. But here they seem like they had a lot of time to chat with each other. So, I mean, it's the same as if you came upon a criminal activity and there's four people hanging out. You separate them so that they're not going to kind of get their story all kind of consonant with one another. And here's what you're going to see sometimes officers get the ire up, because if you draw an analogy saying if this were a crime you had four civilians and all saw a robbery, the first thing you would do is separate the civilians. And officers will say well, you know, we're not like that. We're just trying to independently recollect what occurred. And that's why this is one of these cultural phenomenons that occur. In my experience, very often in policing, they don't actually even see their own built in biases in how their culture is organized. So, when people think they're already conscious efforts to collude to make a false statement, what do you just saw seem really benign and almost natural, where they don't even recognize that that is what they're actually doing. There's also mention in there several of them keep implying that he was on drugs. He was high. You know, I don't know if that was the case or not, but they also didn't know because I don't think they did a toxicology report at that moment. But regardless the behavior that he was exhibiting in that first clip when he's getting pulled over, he seems to be speaking pretty lucidly to the police and saying, hey, come on, you guys are doing a lot right now. Can you stop? I mean, it doesn't look like this is some guy freaking out on drugs, on amphetamines that how common is kind of injecting he was high on drugs into the conversation. I think that and there's a piece by Sue Rahr in the Atlantic that was published a couple of days ago and she is the former sheriff of King County. She ran the whole academy system for the state of Washington and in her essay in the Atlantic she talks about that type of insularity and of how that plays out where you're basically doing this reductive justification of the thing that took place. But the most important thing is to set off that person as the bad guy. So either he is involved in a violent crime or he had a gun or you thought he had a gun or he's on drugs. What you're doing is you're setting that person off as being as being othered. You will even see that how deeply cultural that is that when you will see a use of force report a criminal investigation they will always list the person who upon whom force was used by the police as the assailant and the officer as the victim. And that's before the investigation is even concluded. It begins with that framing. Officer is the victim the other person is the assailant. So you're just seeing that culture playing out in how they are talking about it as they're starting to frame the incident as being drug related. Can I in the interest of kind of moving the conversation along a little bit the one of the my first question is we're looking at these clips without really any context and you know the context hasn't been given by the Memphis the city government or the police department all of these guys have been fired the police chief very quickly said you know like God these guys were acting terribly they deserve to be fired and we won't run the clip in the interest of time but she goes so far as to say you know they really screwed up two quick questions one is is it fair to kind of public discourse to look at this stuff without any context is there a way in which we might pull back and suddenly see all of this makes some some sort of sense you know that we're not seeing now and then secondly can we can we move from the I guess answer the answer that first and then let's go to the next level of responsibility here. Yeah and I'll keep that brief you can never say never and the chief said that we've the officers claim that the reason for the stop was reckless driving we've not seen any evidence of that so perhaps there was something but again officers are supposed to continuously reassess the situation and so we start time at when they first approach to vehicle you can already start accounting for their conduct and to degree was appropriate or not almost regardless of the reason was for the stop so let's go to that next level of responsibility you know this and this is something shortly we'll talk about discussions of progress in policing or at least understanding the extent of issues with policing but you know the police chief was like are these guys you know I don't know who they were but they were not acting and they were bad people here what you know it seems unquestionable that these guys did not know what they were doing or rather whatever they were doing it was bad and it was wrong ineffective and deadly awful but are they to blame or is it then the police department in Memphis and the training and how do we start to unpack that or figure out what we do next well communities and a police department's leadership do help set the tone and they do help put systems in place which allow for this kind of egregious crime to occur ultimately responsibility in terms of individual choices that are made why with all of the charged officers and the other officers are on the scene who fail to render aid or intervene or to report but just because there's individual responsibility like in the mob you know members of a mob are all responsible for their own individual behavior but who instigated the mob also holds culpability I'm not saying there's instigation here this is much more complex what systems that are created but you notice what just happened here just a moment ago we're having a conversation about how the person upon whom force is used who's been victimized by police brutality is shifted into the other as a bad person to be essentially othered or outed and now you're seeing this exact same thing occur with those officers well they're not one of us they're not what we stand for they are others, they are bad and that to an extent does absolve that organizational responsibility look these officers didn't create the scorpion unit they're not the ones who sat around and came up with that ridiculous acronym for a unit name let them loose on the streets of Memphis to enforce the law with thousands of aggressive traffic stops they're not the ones who wasn't listening to the community who are complaining about this unit or who took complaints seriously that was all leadership and this is leadership which decided in how to respond to a rise in violent crime not with for example increasing investments and focused on community rounds and events and strategies but focusing on aggressive policing strategies which have been shown to not only not be that effective when done poorly but also to cause far more harm as we see here can I ask a question about the scorpion unit there was this former reason staffer Radley Balkow put this opinion piece in the New York Times Tyree Nichols' death proves yet again that elite police units are a disaster he talks about the scorpion unit and their function their purpose four groups of 10 officers each would saturate crime hotspots in the city and unmarked cars and make pretextual traffic stops to investigate homicides aggravated assaults, robberies and car jackings and you've seen a lot of media coverage on these lines that the scorpion unit is really a big part of the problem are special when you have a city like Memphis that is experiencing a violent crime an increase in violent crime is the very idea of an elite or just like special unit who's going to try to focus on the really concentrated crime hotspots is that just a bad idea altogether or is it something about this specific unit that was going wrong well when there are concentrations of violent crime to the extent that they do exist how a police department in a city designs its response really matters there is evidence that hotspots policing can be effective but there are a lot of caveats that go along with it and how it is done is really important that it is targeted is really important and it's really interesting how Radley phrased how the city justified it this unit is going to focus on homicides, aggravated assaults and car jackings these type one violent crimes but that's tactics that they used were almost completely unrelated with those types of offenses and it's kind of that cast and wide net approach will stop lots of cars and stopping lots of cars will use a pretext to try to do as many searches as possible in the hopes that we'll find evidence of guns I don't see any indication that the unit for example was designed to focus on people who are potentially identified as being involved in shootings and even that can be questionable if it's not done precisely but we can work on closely for example with the detectives bureau to be developing on the ground evidence this is basically just a group of jackals being let loose on the streets so no, the design is entirely poor and it's not a surprise we can go back to this long history of these so-called special units with cool acronyms LAPD's crash units here we've got the scorpion unit Baltimore at the gun trace task force to create these street team units and give them unmarked cars you let them feel cool because they can wear hoodies at night time you don't put a lot of controls on them you don't have a feedback loop for the quality of arrest that they make nobody's paying attention to whether or not these actually lead to actual charges nobody's following how many complaints they're picking up this is all in the name of public safety and then they're surprised when this I mean I think in a tweet thread that you put out you talked about how actually in this sort of response to increases in crime or in hotspot policing what typically works or what seems to be a better approach is to actually make more of a public display of policing of having cops who are in uniform in marked cars because that assures or sends a signal that the police are around so you were talking about sometimes this can be done well is that something like COMPSTAT that we saw come out of the New York City Transit Police and ultimately the New York Police Department in the 90s is that a better way to go about policing increases in crime or localized outbursts data may tell you what is happening but it's not telling you how to respond to it what did happen in New York City where they ended up you know doing stop and frisks on hundreds of thousands of civilians mainly young black and brown men and yielding very you know either no crime or evidence of criminality or really low what must be considered low quality arrest of arresting people for public showing marijuana whose possession was decriminalized you know we're a foundation we do philanthropic giving and it's really focused on you know maximizing opportunity and minimizing injustice and the work we do on criminal justice is trying to really develop evidence to understand problems and using evidence to identify solutions and then advocating for those types of policy changes so we've spent some time over the last year looking at traffic stops for example so you know we supported work for example by the public public policy institute of California they do analysis of what of RIPAA stop data the state of California requires the collection of stop data they looked at data for the 15 largest agencies in California in 2019 and they showed remarkably low yield rates from traffic stop searches in terms of how many guns are found in many places you will find that that you find yield rates you know in the single dated percentages and but those that reliance on pretext stops are viewed as being pretty low level benign behavior and to ask people who actually are subject to that stop and for them it is not benign whatsoever so that occurs thousands and thousands of times again and so what I don't know is how many stops is this unit making in Memphis how many of those times are defined in contraband how frequently were they making arrests how often were they making using force how often were they generating complaints how many charges were being filed and those are all those kind of data points which are more those how effective and legitimate is the policing so first front end of data where is climate occurring the second set of data is how is the police response working can I ask we've got you for about so you know what what would be a better response than to situations in cities or neighborhoods where crime is spiking you know what what is a better response than creating a scorpion unit that goes around you know goes around prowling and you know and then you know jumps on you know kind of random individuals and can I can I put that question within a little bit of context here this is from the Arnold Ventures website and the subhead here says that the national conference of state legislatures documented more than 700 police reform bills in 2020 so that's you know since the killing of George Floyd there's been a big push for to reform push out of you know those hundreds of reforms you know is there anything that's been particularly promising and and once you address that while we still have you I'd like to go through a few of the proposals that or studies that Arnold Ventures has funded on specific reforms and get you to explain this but sure I think there are some particular policies that we're interested in and so our argument is that very often when a horrible incident occurs there's an effort to fix that one particular problem so after George Floyd there was this big push to stop chokeholds I'm assuming that now after what happened in Memphis there's going to be a push in terms of perhaps pretext traffic stops but we're saying that often it's the regulation of policing where the state can play a much more significant role in many ways policing is a high risk profession or occupation with very little regulation in the exact industries where there probably should be more regulation which carry great risk so for example studies have shown that when officers get fired from misconduct in one agency and they show up at a different agency and get a new job they're more likely to commit misconduct so having robust state licensing processes which include decertification for committing misconduct so to control the wandering officer problem would have a lot of value but the use of force investigated after a significant use of force incident we're very interested in tightening up the rules there and thirdly how are jurisdictions collecting the data so some of those data points I talked about a moment ago are requirements for collection and public transparency so that both community members advocates and other policy makers have a much clear window into the functions of their police department a little bit more about decertification because one of these problems that seems to keep being unearthed when these incidents occur is that often the police involved have had prior problems or prior complaints against them that was the case against a couple of the officers involved in this incident this is a screenshot of the national decertification index which I guess agencies can use to cross reference when they're hiring officers if there's been decertification of them in other in previous jobs what are I assume that's something that for instance police unions would fight against pretty hard I mean is that the case has that been one of the major points of resistance or are there other major barriers to get passed in order to make decertification a lot easier because in some sense it's like it seems like it should be a lot easier to clear out the problematic cops who are abusing people I think if you had a police union guest here he would be talking about the importance of due process for officers and I think that as there has been a push for more robust decertification the critique is from the law enforcement union side is that this takes away rights from officers and I strongly disagree with that most decertification system still rely upon the internal affairs or disciplinary system of the agency to determine whether or not somebody is out of policy or not and whether or not it rises to serious misconduct and we can have a separate conversation about whether or not those will be independent investigations that tend to lean towards. Now, what is decertifiable conduct is the first important question. What falls within that route? I think excessive force sustained excessive force is pretty clearly should fall within that committing a crime being convicted of a crime should fall within that pretty clearly now what are the systems then in place for appealing decertification is it shared across interstate lines is a law enforcement agency required to check the decertification index before hiring those are all those types of rules which should be included and that invite folks to look at one of our other partners the NYU law schools policing project because they've created model legislation on a range of different policing issues including what should be in a decertification bill we're pretty excited that once we set out of really focusing on more robust decertification rules that we began this effort there were still five states that did not have any form of decertification since we began our effort in working with other advocacy partners around the country California has come back online with decertification state of New Jersey just finally passed the bill last year but we still want to see complete compliance and that means that Hawaii and Rhode Island need to get on board and then there's a number of states which have not looked back at decertification in years and there are newer rules and policies are really out of place we think it's a really really important tool though so that officers can't harm people and go off again and do it elsewhere just one follow up Nick and I'll let you get in one thing that you always hear from police officers is that whenever you talk about something like decertification or something like getting rid of qualified immunity which prevents them from getting sued in civil court for violations and also just the general rhetoric that happens around a lot of these incidents that it's demoralizing and it's going to cause it becomes harder to recruit officers and there's more attrition I mean there's some evidence of an exodus in some cities this is an article by Layton Woodhouse where he cites a 21 survey finding police departments nationwide saw resignations jump by 18% retirements by 45% then goes into some of the particular cities that have been racked by protests how do you implement these kind of reforms these police accountability reforms without making it so nobody wants to be a police officer anymore first of all I think we should look at some of these claims with a pretty extreme eye of skepticism just like often we don't have a really clear idea of what causes for example crime to go up or down a lot of claims are made about the increases in officers and agencies in reality it is not that far outside the norm second is is that anyone has paid attention to the actual aerial tables would have known since the 1990s that we would enter an era of a lot of resignations and retirements excuse me and why is that because during the Clinton administration they made a significant effort at police officer hiring so there's a hiring surge in the early to mid 1990s and an officer reaches 100% pension retirement generally in most many jurisdictions after 30 years of service 28 years of service you essentially can retire so we knew that the retirement wave was going to come right about now are we seeing more a few more resignations yes but the problem is we don't exactly know why the survey data and why officers are leaving is not very clear there's been no real cross tab relation to understand whether agencies in cities that did not have protest also have issues we do know from a study done by ABC news affiliates very very few agencies even had their budgets cut so it's really hard to say exactly what is driving officers to leave has the work been tougher with more scrutiny yes but I think the goal should be to increase professionalization of policing so that what we saw in Memphis never happens again can we we've got you for a couple more minutes but if you take a longer picture at the kind of history of policing going back to the early 70s or something like about 50 years ago I know when you look at accounts of something like the NYPD the amount of criminality that was openly discussed by police officers at the time and police commissioners as well as the violence towards everybody that they encountered the number of times that they had interactions with citizens things are way down from that period and over the past 10 years since the Michael Brown deaths in Ferguson there has been about 1100 murders by police killing police killings a year that stayed relatively stable are we actually in a period where policing is getting better but it is that the misdeeds are more visible because of not only body cameras but also because of cell phones and more scrutiny being put on this I'm not trying to say we don't have to worry about anything but actually we are in some way focusing on the last mile here as opposed to entering a new era of what might have been called Giuliani time in the 90s in New York just to put some statistical meat on that this is an article from Billy Binion at Reason who was looking at a claim that last year that police killing 1183 people in 22 was a record high and he went back and looked at data that was compiled by Peter Moskos at John Jay and found that when you compare it to the 70s across the 18 major cities surveyed there's been a 69% drop in fatal police shootings New York City has been quite dramatic as Nick mentioned so I'm just putting that data out there to kind of prime you for that question and that's helpful to see and yeah if you go back to New York City's historical data and New York was one of the few cities which kept good data on officer involved shootings there has been a significant improvement I think for a number of different reasons but the reality is until very recently such data was not even being collected so it's a little tough to say well it's at a record number and then to counter that percent well no once we really scraped the data together is actually much worse but let's keep in mind that so far in the first month of 2023 there have been some high profile police involved killings both now Memphis and before that in Los Angeles with the death of Keenan Anderson school teacher from Washington DC was clearly having some sort of a mental health episode and died after multiple applications of a taser I'm not sure yet what the coroner's going to say was the cause of death the death of Mr. Nichols, neither of those involved a gun right so if Nick if you'd ask me this question let's say on January 5th I would say yeah I think some progress is being made but here we are now after what happened in Memphis and you saw what actually took place I'm not really comfortable with saying well unbalanced things are better if unbalanced things were truly better but these officers had the felt the freedom that they had to viciously beat an innocent person the way that they did so yeah maybe things are better but they're clearly not good enough and most importantly the racial disparities have not disappeared we see racial disparities in traffic stops and who was searched and whom forces used and who was killed I can hear the response right now well that's because black people are more responsible for violent crime was Mr. Nichols carrying the gun was he a suspect of a violent crime was he just some other person who is exercising his liberty interest of the freedom to travel who was infringed upon by police officers and that's what I think is what happened very quickly so that you can leave you know what what are the two or three things that would most move the public discussion forward in a way you know where it's it's not about political tribalism it's not about scoring points it's about actually making society safer for everybody involved I think first and foremost I would like to have the concept of professional policing put forward front and center so there's a conversation about what do we want out of our policing force do we want it to be a vocation an occupation or do we want it to be an actual profession and what are the requirements that come with that and I think that the bar should be set really high now we have to accept the fact that this is a country which has a lot of violent crime we have to accept the fact that there is a lot of guns out there it's not to say that a police officer is an easy job but they come with a high degree of responsibility and I would say that we have to put a lot of focus on mayors and police chiefs who've created the conditions that allowed for that type of unit to even exist the way it is allowed to exist and have so little control of the on the officers thank you Walter Katz of Arnold Ventures for talking to reason we're going to continue the conversation thank you again thank you for giving me so much airtime so we could have an in-depth conversation I really appreciate it we'll do it again thank you so Zach we I mean in a way I'm like in-depth conversation we barely have scratched the surface of Walter Katz's depth of knowledge but also some of the things that we were discussing in preparation for this what's coming to your mind right now in terms of topic that we didn't get to that you absolutely want to yeah well there was this this was from Arnold Ventures they looked at this project out of Durham and Durham North Carolina police department has this thing called the heart program and it's this idea that we heard a little bit about since police reform entered the conversation in a big way after the death of George Floyd of maybe unbundling the police so the police are not necessarily the first responders to everything and so this shows that they've created community response teams for something like a welfare check or a mental health crisis they have crisis call counselors from the crisis called where they then they have like clinicians paired with police and that's an intriguing idea to me I think that this is a pilot program it would have been nice to hear Walter talk a little bit about it but I don't think we have too much data from that but experiments like that are interesting to me he talked a lot about traffic stops how a lot of incidents occur from that and the yield from you know, tasking a team like Scorpion to go out and do as many traffic stops as possible to try to dig something up doesn't seem to pay off and so that's one thing I've always been interested in in the police reform conversation is it possible to have the police do less and be more focused on the things we want them to focus on I think as a broad principle it may be this is a shift that we need to be making in the 21st century away from creating from kind of expecting existing public sector workers that I'm thinking of teachers and I'm thinking of cops and whatnot like where you start to say teachers they're not just supposed to teach they're supposed to be kind of therapists and nutritionists they're going to be social workers and cops are going to be social workers and whatnot and that instead of loading up existing professions with more responsibilities that really kind of cloud and get sideways with the primary function of police or of teaching or whatever unbundling these things into different categories because it seems that you don't if you call the police because somebody is howling at the moon and they might be brandishing a gun or a knife like you want some kind of law enforcement there but they're not going to be the right person to deal with that how you do that effectively and without breaking the bank these are all I think legitimate questions I think for me one of the other questions that we didn't fully get to air and then maybe we can run through some questions and comments as they've come up but is the question of and this was particularly after Michael Brown and Ferguson which is really the moment a decade basically a decade ago when the conversation about police violence especially police violence became front and center was the idea that body cameras were going to be a real game changer and this was drawing off of the energy from Rodney King the idea that a citizen videographer a guy was testing out a video recorder caught this unbelievable beating that ushered in a new era of kind of surveillance of people from below looking at people in charge phones did that cell phones everybody becomes a kind of recorder a citizen recorder a citizen journalist we've written a lot about and done a lot of videos about whether or not it's legal for citizens to tape the police while they're doing their stuff and it is always and everywhere the police don't like that but now this next step of that body cams we're going to change things and it's not it's not clear that they have systematically they definitely body cam footage in particular instances has seen justice get done create the groundswell for reform in which down the road justice might become possible yeah and it might be worth playing this excerpt that we have from former reason TV Steph or Paul Dietrich did a lot of documentaries about policing body cameras he did something on he did several videos on the Kelly Thomas case which you'll see here in a moment I'm going to ask Adam our backstage producer play the Kelly Thomas died a few days after that beating today in court we're hearing accusations of how Thomas was pummeled and left lying in a pool of his own blood and on the night of July 5th 2011 he posed no threat at all to the police or to anyone else the suspect was uncontrollable they couldn't handcuff they couldn't control him an officer is trained basically to control him secure did not train to tie and this was not even a tie prosecutor said that the last words out of his mouth were God help me daddy they're trying to kill me daddy during opening statements from the DA you know choke me up again with Kelly calling out for me without that city video Kelly would just be like everybody else who was murdered by the police and there would never have been charges so I mean there's a lot there are a lot of similarities actually to this case the issue of the officers seeming to not know how to restrain someone in a non lethal way there's the issue of the cameras and what role they play and I mean his father there makes the case now we're getting a little more acclimated to police officers in these incidents being charged and even convicted sometimes in the case of Derek Chauvin in the Floyd case back then this was nine years ago it wasn't common for police officers to even go to trial these these officers were ultimately acquitted so then there was a long period of officers getting caught on tape enough public pressure forcing them to trial but then getting acquitted for whatever reason juries are more willing to hold officers criminally responsible we'll see what happens in the Tyree Nichols case but I would say that's a case for body cameras you know unfortunately as this case shows us maybe police officers have just gotten acclimated to them and they just are they don't think what they're doing is wrong or something but I do think there's still value in being able to see it and it can create some momentum for there to be justice in the form of a trial and also we also you can't of course measure the amount of times a police officer did restrain himself because he knew that the camera was running absolutely and the other thing that you know the police officers can reformers bring up that I think is important is it can also exonerate police and has been used to that end so it's kind of a win all around in that sense I absolutely agree with that and it does get down to this question of course this is implicit in the Rodney King case where in the original trial the defense police they were acquitted by a jury you know that later change in a later federal trial but it's never going to be one thing or the other but it's better to have it just to run through some of the questions here before we sign off TF ask question for panel does race play a role in this if so why why is the media and individuals saying it is racist you know I think race does play a role in this that there remain real discrepancies in the way that policing is done and the way that certain populations particularly black men of a certain age are overpoliced and it's you know so in that sense I think it plays a role both in the Kelly Thomas case that we just talked about here but also in this one the fact that the officers who did the beating were also black it's given rise to some you know articles and headlines saying that blacks have internalized white supremacy etc etc I don't find that particularly convincing but I think what is helpful in this case and this goes beyond race is that it will focus on actual police activity because in the end police could be stopping people and you know for reckless driving and not killing them as they did in this case another Kevin clause 4P55P says stricter hiring including psych tests better pay for good cops more rigorous training fire cops that make bad choices that's a lot of what Walter was talking about there we didn't talk about psych tests so I'll leave that one there but better pay more rigorous training certainly or I don't know if rigor is even the right way to think about it but he seems to be saying a type of training that kind of a sort of de-escalation training that either was not present in this case or the officers were not following you know we don't know what sort of training the Memphis Police Department had but whatever it was it was certainly not applied in this case and there's that question too of de-escalation tactics and from what I've read police forces in Europe actually tend to do this better partly because they don't face as much gun crime so the police often times either are not carrying guns or they're slower to respond with guns but a lot of de-escalation tactics and technology such as tasers end up weirdly getting in the way of police actually doing de-escalation because they're like I have a non-lethal way of ending this by tasering somebody or hitting them with a baton which is supposed to be non-lethal and it actually kind of gets in the way of what those pieces of technology are in the mix to begin with but I also think it's worth talking for a second about these other two items better pay for good cops and fire cops that make bad choices I mean the de-certification conversation we had earlier was about partially being able to not only fire cops that make bad choices but then to not have other departments rehire them by having some way to track like did this individual get fired from another department for some really terrible incident or are you going to keep playing musical chairs with these people and this is where I see a connection to the way that we've seen teachers in certain school districts there's some bad Apple teachers there was famously in New York City they would be put in the rubber rooms because they couldn't even be fired so they would just sit in a room all day because the union wouldn't let the district fire this teacher and so there's that also relates to higher pay for cops because if you can't fire the bad cops you don't have the budget to pay the good cops more money and so I think that's partially what Walter's talking about with a professionalization of policing you need to break that relationship and that bureaucracy and that relationship between the public sector union and the political class in these cities that is upholding its power to me that's kind of a bedrock fundamental thing that until you do that you're not really going to be able to get to a real professionalization and I don't think any of that is going to be easy whether we're talking about teachers or cops for instance obviously you can incentivize good behavior and punish bad behavior but what is a good cop you know is a good cop somebody who makes a lot of arrests is it a good cop who never gets brought up on charges of you know making too many arrests or being a little bit you know handsy on certain types of arrests it's complicated and it's going to have to be adjudicated and you know certain types of work are more given to collective bargaining which doesn't mean everybody gets paid exactly the same but it bureaucratizes the relationship between employer and employee and to your point you know and to Walter Katz's point about mayors and police commissioners being held responsible for changing the culture you know that's absolutely the case Richard LaRose on Facebook asks or it says hold sergeants, lieutenants and captains responsible for the conduct of their officers the chain of command knows who should not be cops long before something bad happens until the chain of command starts being prosecuted like CEOs and officers of company nothing will change law and order is necessary for civilization to exist you know I think creating that kind of you know real like accountability at every level is you know fundamental and you know one of the questions I guess or one I think this is no longer a question there was an idea well in order to keep the peace you have to kind of turn the blind eye to crack the heads like you know in the Earl Morris documentary the thin blue line from the late 80s which was about a police officer being shot during a traffic stop and then ultimately the wrong person being you know put on death row about that but the judge in that case famously choked up while he was listening to the prosecution talk about how police were the thin blue line between chaos etc like I think as a society we have moved to a place where virtually everybody recognizes the necessity and the power of the police for good but also that we need we can no longer start to just say well you know what like invading armies occupying armies policemen certain types of people who put the public servants who put themselves at risk we have to let them blow we have to give them more latitude that we're not in that place anymore and we shouldn't be but this chain of responsibility that has to be you know at the fractal level every cell of every person who's involved in this needs to be held responsible and know it and enforce it throughout the system easier said than done yes and some of that has some of that happens through some competitive pressure or some feeling that that we're not stuck with just this one commander or this this one agency even you know there's always different law enforcement agencies kind of overlapping within districts and also that idea we were talking about earlier of trying to unbundle or you know bring in other experts besides police to deal with every situation if there's other agencies that begin to prove themselves more competent in certain areas you can shift away from the corrupt institutions and put that sort of pressure on them to reform so that's another aspect I think of trying to make it so that you're just not just pouring more and more money into an institution that has these problems and hoping that if you fund it enough it's going to somehow change yeah that's I think that's a good libertarian point and a good reason point to to focus on you know giving more money to a broken system you know just creates you know more spending on a broken system it doesn't fundamentally fix it and that's true of education it's true of policing it's true of defense and things like that but by the same token I think you may disagree with me on this I've written a lot about how when trust and confidence in institutions whether they're private or especially public government institutions decline people lose you know there it's impossible to be accountable and at the same time people give those public institutions more power because they're worried about chaos and things like that and I think there's a bit of horseshoe theory going on between libertarians and progressive leftists in the all cops are bastards camp if you actually believe that police are inherently racist are inherently sexist are inherently violent and awful and incompetent and a scourge upon the land there is no hope for reform actually and this is where I think from a specifically libertarian perspective what we need to be doing is narrowing the scope and certainly the spending of public action but we need to be narrowing it and holding our public actors whether we're talking about the defense industry or on the national level or welfare at the state, local and federal level but things like education and police we have to narrow the scope of what we expect these people to do and then hold them accountable because otherwise if it is just simply all cops are bastards they're all evil kind of the extreme right and the extreme left in many ways kind of coming together on that then we're screwed and we're not going to see police budgets get cut as Walter was talking about and I think reason has shown police departments were not defunded after George Floyd any more than the FAA is going to be defunded after causing you know a massive traffic snafu over the holiday they're going to get more money the real thing to do is to narrow their scope of authority and then hold them accountable for results that are actually in the public interest this commenter Chuckie Cheese which is appropriate for the gravity of this conversation but treating these officers as though they are representation of greater policing treating ANTIFA as their representatives of free speech in America that's echoing the point that you're making about you know kind of just waving away that all police are all cops are bastards and it's an irredeemably corrupt institution you know I think the more productive thing is to be focused on what should the police be doing I think those libertarians believe they should be protecting people's lives and their property and pretty much not too much beyond that really and I think that it's the creep beyond that that has caused a lot of the problems I mean drugs are the drug war really is the background to so many of these incidents even in this Tyree Nichols incident we talked about earlier how the police are constantly saying oh he was high he was high on something we don't know and perhaps setting some sort of pretext it's often searching for drugs is just the pretext for getting involved with something that never needed to be get involved with in the first place and so I think that saying you know even an anarchist is going to say you know you're going to need some sort of security force it just needs to be focused on the things that we all want which is public safety and protection you know the drug war is you know is I've talked about it for decades now as a kind of structuring reality and every aspect of American life and political life as well as social and cultural life it is there in education it is there in foreign policy it is there in medical practice obviously in all sorts of ways but when you hear police I mean I get a shiver down my spine every time you hear police say he must have been high on something or he seemed to be high on something his pupils were dilated he had super strength usually he not always fears in fears of cocaine negroes Google cocaine negroes in the New York Times and you'll see early iterations of this it's a bad kind of motif in American life and that is also changing I think people are starting to understand that the drug war is kind of get out of jail free card for all kinds of dumb stupid often times criminal behavior by government but this one person here who paid ten dollars to ask a question T.F. he says do you think or she they say do you think race plays a role we're hiring standards lowered by the city or station regarding criminal history what is the service history of the officers was everyone involved drug tested you know we've kind of covered a lot of this stuff one question about the hiring standards you know I doubt that any police department in the country is like you know what we don't care if you are a violent felon we're going to hire you anyway but that question of vetting of police officers and of what they've done in the past and you know I think it's a you know it's a fair question I mean police we expect them we give them a lot of power we expect them to do a lot they are actually well compensated one should be paid more bad one should be fired but you know the real these are basic root level questions that need to be answered and I do think the question about race needs to be discussed more forthrightly people tend to not want to talk about it or they go into I think platitudes of just saying well of course you know America is a white supremacist country America is a racist country it's there in the beginning it's there in the colonies and it's now here I think that simplifies things and it actually clout first of it's wrong I mean America has many racially you know kind of dictated or oriented sins that we have not yet paid for fully but we've also overcome a lot of that and the promise of America and the reality of America is not that it is here to uphold white supremacy quite the opposite but we need to be able to talk about the ways in which race still plays a absolutely important role in certain types of activities and deal with that so that this doesn't become a republican or a democratic talking point and nothing you know you rub a bunch of sticks together and get some smoke but you don't get anything that actually is useful or it's going to change the situation I think that with with regards to race it's an important layer that can be addressed in a lot of different situations but incidents like this and the Kelly Thomas incident we showed earlier are at least sufficient to show that even if we got rid of all the problems of racism that doesn't it's not going to solve the problem you know Kelly Thomas was a white mentally ill guy these were five black officers doing this to a black suspect who they pulled over that you know race can play a fact obviously plays a factor in you know how much interaction people have with police officers but even if you took that totally out of the equation and you solved all that there's still going to be unjust police killings and I think it was important what you were bringing up earlier with Walter trying to put the numbers in context historically and say yes it's not acceptable for anyone to be treated the way that Tyree Nichols was treated it's also important to acknowledge that things were really bad 30 40 years ago and there's been significant improvements and now maybe there's been a little bit of a flat line there on the improvement and now we're really targeted interventions to just push that down as low as possible so that this virtually never happens like that is we're never going to get to utopia we're never going to get to the perfect situation but we want it to be as close to that as possible but if you're constantly despairing that oh it's never changing it's never getting any worse or it's never getting any better in the face of evidence contrary when you look at the historical picture then the despair is going to prevent that momentum from continuing and it's not only that it's also the flip side of that I'm just pulling up a couple stats with regards to crime because we've heard a lot about the recent crime spikes which are real when you talk about murders in US cities crime overall in US cities post pandemic there's been a spike and that's something that is driving a lot of the creation of things like the scorpion unit here this is in the city of Memphis you see the long term trend in major violent crime up that uptick post 2019 however you still have to look at the big picture on that as well this is the FBI crime data explorer showing on the left there rate of violent crime offenses by population rate of homicide offenses by population you see that disturbing spike there at the end in the homicide but we still need to acknowledge that we never want to get back up to that hill back in the 80s and 90s and we need to stop it from getting there but we need to be cognizant of the big picture so that we're not either underreacting or overreacting kind of the playoff of that from a different angle too it's also probably a mistake always to look at police homicides or killings by the police and if there's 1100 a year roughly let's say that 90% of those are totally justified so that's flat that's important because it's the most extreme thing but even in the crime data you were showing looking at homicides homicides are statistically rare compared to regular crime or violent crime and I was going to say in New York City after stop and frisk which was not originally part of Comstant it came in later and stop and frisk of people on the streets almost exclusively young men mostly black mostly Latino being stopped by cops some leading to arrests and things like that the way policing is done it can be incredibly disruptive to everybody's life I think what Walter Katz was talking about at one point is the case that a traffic stop may look benign compared to being pulled out of your car and beaten to death by the police but as you were talking about in your personal experience it is deeply traumatizing it is also true up until recently in a typical year there were a million arrests for marijuana possession across the country and nothing happened to virtually all of those people but being arrested is not a small thing and it can be disruptive enough mental issues in people where their lives are disrupted or their lives are actually disrupted and they lose their job or relationships go downhill we need to be thinking about this stuff how do we have as light a footprint as possible using the state and the monopoly on violence that the state has to maintain the peace the other thing to stop blithering on about this I am old enough to remember a period in the 70s and the 80s and then a beginning of rising crime in general, particularly violent crime I mean for a 30 year period crime was a national issue in political races it has only recently become that again it is not exactly clear why violent crime started declining in the 90s virtually all criminologists at the time, regardless of ideology or political commitment were expecting it to keep going up and up and up everybody bought into the rise of the super predator kind of theory that was just a given and it started declining part of the decline was policing part of it is a large number of demographic factors, economic factors cultural factors environmental factors that people disagree on so we need to keep crime down but we also need to recognize that policing also can help do that obviously but also it can't be given a kind of carte blanche to start disrupting everybody's lives regardless of civil liberties absolutely what I took from that experience and again this was just one incident that happened to me I was leaving a parking lot where there was some sort of undercover drug bust happening and a guy pointed to me as I was leaving and I guess the cops thought I was his associate and they ended up pulling me over taking me out of the car, cupping me and at the end of the day they didn't rough me up or anything but even just that encounter I was like man I hate cops now and I was like every time I would see a cop for months after that I would get a little worked up from it and so imagine that you are in a demographic and maybe people have experienced this just from being pulled over on the highway and having a rude interaction with the cop but imagine that you are in a demographic in a neighborhood where the police are just aggressively checking in on people to try to keep things for public safety reasons but there's often people who they're not doing anything wrong and every time that interaction happens it's just going to get heightened and heightened and there's more chance that the person is going to cop an attitude with the officer and so that's why or that the cop is having a bad day and they've got the attitude one of the most interesting studies in the wake of the George Floyd killing that was I know we discussed at reason in various articles and videos and what not was that in any given police encounter the odds of of it escalating to an arrest or any kind of violent interaction is excruciating small but it was true that and this is a place where race plays into things where blacks and latinos are more likely to have more interactions and so even if it's a half of a percent chance if you quintuple the number of encounters with the police you're increasing the odds of a bad outcome you know and that's the type of thing to you know to keep in mind so Zach I think we have talked through just about everything is there anything that you are you know that you want to end on you know just to that last point this is why I think that you know for libertarians especially but really anyone who cares about police reform figuring out ways to minimize unnecessary interactions with the police is really like the key and what I'm focused on and what I hope you know comes out of this and the work that Walter Katz is doing with Arnold Ventures I really appreciate you know first of all how data-driven it is they're trying to look at small run small pilot programs and actually document results and say what can we do to reduce those interactions well also acknowledging police play an important role in keeping public safety that we don't want to compromise that I think there's just pretty broad societal like consensus on that we want those two things less police brutality more public safety and the only way to get there is really to look at the policies and what effects they're having and so that's why I really appreciate Walter taking the time to come on talk through some of it with us and I encourage you to check out the work that Arnold Ventures has done on police reform and all that everything that we referenced here and every stream will be in the show notes below so please you know dig into that if you're interested go to the show notes follow Walter Katz on Twitter he's an extremely excellent follow and Arnold Ventures which I should add funds Foundation the non-profit that publishes reason it's a really fantastic organization not simply because it funds us but it is doing stuff on everything from pension reform to police reform and things like that they are a data driven really sharp and good organization I'll also just end it by saying we appreciate people watching the live streams please send Zach and me we have open DMs on Twitter he's at the abridged Zach Z-A-C-K I'm at Nick Gillespie on Twitter Z-A-C-H excuse me I'm sorry my my memory is going here but you know send us ideas or put them in the reason Twitter feed send them to you know the add reason emails who do you want to see on live streams what topics do you want to see covered and things like that Zach is going to go missing next week on the live stream because he is going to be shooting on location in the great state of Texas but we'll be back next week at Thursday at 1pm so on behalf of Zach Weismiller and Walter Katz thanks for showing up at the reason live stream thanks